The Ethical Limits of Neuroeducation

Abstract

What are and where are the ethical limits of neuroeducation? The article reflects on a necessary question for the evolution of cognitive processes through critical deliberation, the delimitation of boundaries and the estimation of progress. On the one hand, it argues that the experimental turn could call into question the ethical and humanistic goal of education; on the other hand, it argues that a systematic renunciation of neuroscientific advances would also mean abandoning the quest for human flourishing. The humanities alone do not provide the biopsychosocial approach from which we must understand our self-realisation. Thus, the first of the limits that is the origin of all the others arises from a scientific-humanist dilemma. The new boundaries to be delimited are the neuroscientific implications in themselves and how these are translated into educational if they were to be valid in this field. Here neuromyths play an important role. It is precisely neuroethics as an applied ethics or branch of bioethics that takes up these aspects through neuroeducational ethics and educational neuroethics. In its fundamental branch, this discipline opens the debate on moral neuroeducation. But the possibility of reducing morality and all that we are to our neural bases leads to new limits. To overcome them, he highlights the potential of a sociocultural and biological symbiosis with the notions of 'neuroculture' and 'proactive epigenesis'. Finally, the essay deliberates on the more speculative boundaries between what we are and our possibilities for understanding it based on transhumanism.